On Friday, Sharona Coutts, vice president of investigations and research at RH Reality Check, joined Dr. Willie Parker in a segment on Democracy Now! about the recent attacks against Planned Parenthood and its fetal tissue donation program. A recent RHRC investigation suggests the group behind the current attempts to defame the health-care provider might have committed credit card fraud.

RH Reality Check‘s Jodi Jacobson recently appeared on The Big Picture and explained the “elaborate ruse” used by the Center for Medical Progress in order to mislead the public about services provided by Planned Parenthood.

On this episode of Reality Cast, host Amanda Marcotte analyzes the Planned Parenthood attack videos, which she thinks may, in the long run, end up hurting anti-choicers more than helping them. Also, ThinkProgress reporter Erica Hellerstein is on the show and talks about how abstinence-only didn’t go away but just got rebranded.

On this episode of Reality Cast, host Amanda Marcotte digs into the furor over the hoax video accusing Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue, and is joined by Hannah Groch-Begley of Media Matters, who analyzes how that video lied.

On this episode of Reality Cast, Jacqueline Ayers of Planned Parenthood tells us about Congress’ sneaky attempts to kill family planning funding. And host Amanda Marcotte reviews conservative reactions to the Supreme Court rulings on health care and same-sex marriage.

A coalition of Texas groups have come together this summer to launch two new efforts intended to help residents access legal abortion care and to communicate more broadly about Texans’ families, their lives, and their reproductive decisions.

The National Abortion Federation filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prohibit the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-choice organization behind a campaign to defame Planned Parenthood, from making public any video or audio recordings and materials of NAF educational meetings.

Researchers from France recently presented the results of a case in which a girl born with HIV who was treated early in life has remained in remission without medication for 12 years. Experts are excited but cautious because similar cases have ended with HIV being detected in patients blood again.

Reps. André Jacque (R-De Pere) and Joel Kleefisch (R-Oconomowoc) circulated a draft of the bill this week and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) promised a floor vote for the bill even though it hasn’t yet been formally introduced.

The dysfunctional Medicaid privatization program championed by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) known as KanCare continues to face public scrutiny and federal investigations into claims that patients experienced long waits and subpar care.

Mary Hallan-FioRito, who sits on Aid for Women’s Board of Directors, suggested during her speech in Chicago, “Let’s take that $500 million [public funds awarded to Planned Parenthood] and put it where American women really want it to go: safer neighborhoods, better housing, and better education for their children.”

In a letter to California Attorney General Kamala Harris, 32 attorneys from across the country asked that her investigation of the anti-choice front group behind the Planned Parenthood attack videos be conducted with the “utmost urgency,” due to what they call “a real threat to abortion provider safety.”

About 150 people attended the rally, held the day before a Texas senate committee is set to hear testimony concerning fetal tissue collection for medical research at Texas Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Whether we are being charged for cheering at a graduation or treated like delinquents for attending a pool party, this week has been a reminder that Black people are still criminalized for being human.

Planned Parenthood is certainly the target, but its destruction is not the goal, any more than destroying ACORN was the true goal back in 2008. Destruction would be a happy side effect, but the true goal is to destroy the pathway for women to have access to legal and safe abortions.

Ideological warfare about abortion via advertising has a long track record, though it’s a past largely forgotten in history’s fog and the present’s relentless attacks on abortion rights. Today’s reproductive rights and justice advocates can’t afford to forget that past.

Texas lawmakers spent four-and-a-half hours “investigating” whether an entity that does not provide the legal service of fetal tissue donation has violated any laws while it doesn’t provide that legal service.

One Utah program makes students choose to promise to uphold several flawed statements on abstinence. I would love to believe that the students would be brave enough to challenge what’s written on the page, but just in case, I decided to explain why some of the most outrageous statements just don’t make sense.

After Maine Gov. Paul LePage made national news earlier this month by claiming to have “pocket vetoed” 19 bills that became law without his signature, messages started popping up in my inbox saying things like “An accidental win!” and “Maine—accidentally—outlaws shackling pregnant women?”

According to Erick Erickson, a regular Fox News contributor, editor of RedState.com, and guest host for Rush Limbaugh, women who seek reproductive health care are “pregnant female animals” with no ability for autonomous thinking.

True Detective‘s second season has rolled out a character who thinks she’s infertile because of abortions in her youth. Sadly, this is just part of a larger pattern of this supposedly mainstream show regurgitating ugly right-wing myths about women.

Just as much as these videos are part of a highly orchestrated campaign to discredit Planned Parenthood, they were also part of an ongoing campaign to target and harass individual abortion providers and others connected with the safe and legal provision of abortion care.

As a white liberal of adult age in the 1960s, you were politically required to support the civil rights movement, right? So why the hell are you tossing that information in Black people’s faces on behalf of Bernie Sanders in order to shut down conversations about structural racism, police brutality, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement?

However useful Kennedy finds it for expanding constitutional protections for certain rights, dignity is a gendered double-edged sword. It’s great for men and it has turned out to be great for same-sex couples who want to get married. But dignity as a concept is worthless when it comes to reproductive rights.

The videos released by CMP show quite definitively that Planned Parenthood is not engaged in the illegal sale of fetal tissue. They also show something else, something that CMP likely did not intend—that their own coordinated attack violated a host of laws.

RH Reality Check has identified at least three names that appear to have been used as pseudonyms by Center for Medical Progress operatives. One of these names appears to belong to a childhood acquaintance of the group’s apparent ringleader, David Daleiden.

Comments made last year by a senior attorney at the Alliance Defending Freedom could have enormous implications for how Americans now grapple with the development of LGBTQ rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision on same-sex marriage.

Amy Hagstrom Miller and Amanda Williams at ChoiceWorks speak about their vision for their new nonprofit Shift, why they’ve chosen to launch in Texas, and what the end of abortion stigma might look like in red states.

Yamani Hernandez recently chatted with RH Reality Check about her work to build a broad human rights movement that lives up to its inclusive values, her unconventional professional trajectory, and the people who inspired and stoked her activism.

Dr. Chastine fights back against anti-choice threats and intimidation by providing the best possible care to her patients, who often travel long distances as additional political and economic hurdles are put in their way.